Grid Computing

In computing, the term "Grid" to refers to the sharing of IT resources across institutional boundaries. Today's grids span campuses of Universities, nations, continents and some go beyond that. On grids, one participant can use CPU time or storage or other resources of someone else (any service could be offered on a grid) at any time - if the user can prove by some (dynamically generated) certificate that he is indeed belonging to the right virtual organisation. The term should not be mistaken for the SETI@Home-like volunteer computing, best represented by BOINC, to which individuals are computing without any direct benefit for themselves. That said, some groups are working on setups to bring volunteer and computational grids together.

This page is intended to collect together information on packages and prospective packages useful for grid computing, along with information on how to use them across the several incompatible computing grids.

Packages and Prospective packages

Globus upstream The Globus Toolkit is an open source software toolkit used for building Grid systems and applications.